Felix Salmon

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In the September issue of Euromoney, Peter Lee has a huge investigation into what he calls “the great bond liquidity drought”. The landing page for the story features subscriber-only links to the whole thing, as well as free-to-access links to various sections. But it also neatly summarizes the problem a single paragraph:

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One of my pet distinctions is the one between a bubble and a speculative bubble. All speculative bubbles are bubbles, but not all bubbles are speculative. In the markets, the late-90s dot-com bubble was speculative: it was based on the greater-fool theory that even if you were overpaying today, you’d be able to sell to an ever greater fool tomorrow, and make lots of money. A speculative bubble is fueled by flippers — people who don’t much care for or about what they’re buying, but who reckon that whatever it is, they’ll be able to sell it at a nice profit. So the Miami condo bubble of the mid-00s was speculative, while the current Miami real-estate market, which is nearly as hot, isn’t.

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Duff McDonald has a wonderful review of Brad Stone’s new book on Amazon in the NYT; he’s a fantastic nonfiction book reviewer. There is one part of the review, however, which could do with a bit more explanation:

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Bond spreads, along with their close cousin credit default swaps, are a beautifully linear measure of sovereign default risk. They go up in a straight and steady line: the higher the number, the riskier the country is perceived to be. And so they’re normally the first and last place that people look when they’re interested in the chances of any given country defaulting.

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Have you heard about the global wine shortage? Of course you have: it’s been covered in pretty much every media outlet imaginable, but Roberto Ferdman’s piece for Quartz (“A global wine shortage could soon be upon us”) was one of the first, and also one of the most detailed. Still, it was the classic single-source article: it basically took one Morgan Stanley report, reproduced a bunch of the key charts, and added a clickbaity headline.

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Anthony DeRosa retweeted this photo on Wednesday morning, which came with the caption “Math is difficult for many journalists”. I was genuinely confused: I couldn’t see any math errors in the screenshot. So I asked DeRosa where the error was. He replied:

Helaine Olen has a fantastic piece on Dave Ramsey in Pacific Standard, giving a very clear view of what he does and where his program falls short. I recently wrote about Ramsey’s investment advice for Money — the blog post is here — and the Money headline was “Save like Dave… Just don’t invest like him”. So there’s a disconnect between my view of Ramsey and Olen’s: while I think his saving and debt-reduction advice is sensible and valuable, she thinks it falls short in many key ways.

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I’m very glad that the WSJ has published today’s debate between Farhad Manjoo and Dennis Berman on the subject of Apple. Manjoo has been writing some very insightful columns about the company, including the one yesterday which explained that Apple has many better options, when it comes to spending its cash, than taking Carl Icahn’s advice and essentially mortgaging the entire pile to conduct a stock buyback.

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When 2011 came to an end, the dominance of Chinese artists in the international league tables was clear, if puzzling. Three of the top five artists, in terms of sales, and both of the top two, were Chinese; Zhang Daqian alone managed to gross more than half a billion dollars at auction that year, the first time any artist had come anywhere near that level.